Honeybee Prize

⭐ The 2026 HoneyBee Poetry Prize is open. ⭐
Combined prize payout is $1000.
The winner will receive $500, publication, and a jar of honey from a Midwest apiary. 🍯
All other finalists will be published with an honorarium of $60 per piece.

Contest Details:

Up to ten poems will be selected as finalists by our current editorial team. The poem chosen as the winner will receive $500, publication in our Summer Issue, and a jar of honey from Fruit of Levine farm in Bennington, Nebraska. All finalists will be published with an honorarium of $60 per piece.

Our judge this year is the fabulous Marya Hornbacher!!

The contest fee is $18. Results will be announced in June, with Publication in July.

Submission guidelines are the same as our regular publication guidelines. Key details are as follows:

  • Original, previously unpublished poems only.
  • There is no length limit on individual poems, but please send no more than 5 poems per submission and no more than 10 pages in total.
  • Poems should be typed with at least one-inch margins and a 12-point serif font, preferably Times New Roman in Word or PDF format. We do our best to format poems to the exact specification desired, but those with long lines may wrap unconditionally when rendered on some tablets and mobile phones.
  • We prefer to read blind, so please remove your name from the submitted document.

For a comprehensive set of guidelines, please visit our general submission page.

We will respond to all submitted work; however, it may take from one to six months, depending on when the poems are submitted within the contest period. Thank you in advance for your patience.

Multiple submissions are permitted, but the fee will be required for each set.

For info about our 2025 contest, please visit the 2025 HoneyBee Prize results.

Meet this year’s judge…
A woman with long, dark hair and glasses sits by a window, looking thoughtfully at the camera. Her arm is adorned with a colorful tattoo, and there are plants visible in the background.

Marya Hornbacher is an award-winning journalist, essayist, novelist, and poet, and the New York Times bestselling author of five books. She has received the Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction, the Logan Fellowship for Social Justice Journalism, the White Award for Magazine Journalism, the ASCAP Award for Music Journalism, the Fountain House Humanitarian Award, and other distinctions. Her work appears in publications including New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Minneapolis StarTribune, Chicago Reader, Smithsonian Magazine, Vogue, Glamour, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Longreads, AGNI, Arts & Letters, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, and many more. She is the creator of the bestselling Substack “Going Solo at the End of the World,” a multi-media report from the American road. Her sixth book, Solo, is forthcoming from Hachette/Cardinal in early 2027.